Deputy claims self-defense in 6-year-old's fatal shooting

[Judi Lynn]

Source: Associated Press

Deputy claims self-defense in 6-year-old's fatal shooting

Michael Kunzelman, Associated Press

Updated 11:00 am, Friday, September 23, 2016

BATON ROUGE, La. (AP) — A deputy city marshal charged with murder after a police body camera captured a 6-year-old boy's fatal shooting is asking a Louisiana judge to throw out his indictment, saying he acted in self-defense by opening fire on a car driven by the boy's father.

Prosecutors from Attorney General Jeff Landry's office said the video shows two deputy marshals firing from "a safe distance" as Christopher Few's car was backing away from them. "Perhaps most important, it shows Few with his hands in the air pleading for the officers to stop firing. They did not," prosecutors wrote in a filing this week.

But Derrick Stafford's attorneys say the video recording lacks audio for the first 27 seconds, making it impossible to determine if Stafford started shooting before or after Few raised his hands inside the car. Neither deputy knew that Few's son, Jeremy Mardis, was strapped in the front seat until after they stopped shooting, Stafford's attorneys added.

. . .

State Police have said the deputies opened fire on Few's car after a pursuit joined by a third deputy marshal and Marksville Police Sgt. Kenneth Parnell III. A police report says video from Parnell's body camera shows Few's empty hands were raised and visible inside the vehicle when gunfire erupted. The video hasn't been publicly released.



Read more: http://www.chron.com/news/crime/article/Deputy-claims-self-defense-in-6-year-old-s-fatal-9241732.php

[TheSarcastinator]

1. completely f**king disgusting

I can't even. Keep calling black men who refuse to rise for the national anthem traitors and racists, by all means. The fact that I've even read that perspective here at DU is freaking horrific.

[msanthrope]

2. This country need to take a long hard look at who we give a gun and a badge to. nt

[mrmpa]

3. Back in the early '90's..........

myself and a co-worker wrote guidelines for the hiring of City Police Officers. We kept a whole lot of bad candidates from becoming Police Officers.

[tblue37]

4. We actually have a good idea of who is often getting those guns and badges--unfortunately.

http://thegrio.com/2015/05/12/fbi-white-supremacists-law-enforcement/

FBI's warning of white supremacists infiltrating law enforcement nearly forgotten

Because of intensifying civil strife over the recent killings of unarmed black men and boys, many Americans are wondering, “What’s wrong with our police?” Remarkably, one of the most compelling but unexplored explanations may rest with a FBI warning of October 2006, which reported that “White supremacist infiltration of law enforcement” represented a significant national threat.

Several key events preceded the report. A federal court found that members of a Los Angeles sheriffs department formed a Neo Nazi gang and habitually terrorized the black community. Later, the Chicago police department fired Jon Burge, a detective with reputed ties to the Ku Klux Klan, after discovering he tortured over 100 black male suspects. Thereafter, the Mayor of Cleveland discovered that many of the city police locker rooms were infested with “White Power” graffiti. Years later, a Texas sheriff department discovered that two of its deputies were recruiters for the Klan.

In near prophetic fashion, after the FBI’s warning, white supremacy extremism in the U.S. increased, exponentially. From 2008 to 2014, the number of white supremacist groups, reportedly, grew from 149 to nearly a thousand, with no apparent abatement in their infiltration of law enforcement.

This year, alone, at least seven San Francisco law enforcement officers were suspended after an investigation revealed they exchanged numerous “White Power” communications laden with remarks about “lynching African-Americans and burning crosses.” Three reputed Klan members that served as correction officers were arrested for conspiring to murder a black inmate. At least four Fort Lauderdale police officers were fired after an investigation found that the officers fantasized about killing black suspects.

SNIP

much more at link

http://thegrio.com/2015/05/12/fbi-white-supremacists-law-enforcement/

[The Wizard]

6. Republicans pitched a fit

and the report got skunked. So why would Repubics get their knickers in a wad over this? Real simple, they're bigots.

[EL34x4]

10. What does this have to do with this story?

The cops in this case are black. The dead 6-year old boy they shot was white.

[tblue37]

11. I was responding directly to the point made by malaise in comment #2:

This country need to take a long hard look at who we give a gun and a badge to.

[Angry Dragon]

5. yes

[FrodosPet]

17. Alas, good people are not applying to become cops

I've brought the topic up before. The people with the ideology to become GOOD cops, for various reasons, do NOT want to become cops. They can only hire from a pool of applicants. If good people are not applying, they are stuck with the people who do apply.

[jtuck004]

7. Louisiana State Baby Killers. Brave officers there.n/t

[TexasBushwhacker]

8. If I killed a child

even accidentally, I would plead guilty to whatever they charged me with and expect to spend the rest of my life in prison. How can these police live with themselves?!

[Bette]

9. Because...

The police no longer seem to have any conscience. They will always find a way to justify their actions because they can. We have allowed this to happen, we won't fight to make it right. Now they have way too much power and we are screwed. But now that we are getting video of their crimes, we have a chance to change things. And we must continue to show everyone their crimes. We have to demand they keep those body cams on, no excuses and we should demand when they are caught, they cannot get off so easy with administrative leave, which is PAID. they need to be suspended without pay until the investigations are over. If there are serious consequences, like losing money and possibly your job, maybe these cops will think a little before killing us.

[Sand Rat Expat]

12. Disagree about the unpaid administrative leave.

You're punishing the cop before any determination of guilt or innocence has been made if you do that. They have bills to pay and families to feed just like the rest of us. Punishing them in absence of a conviction is wrong, just like it would be wrong to do it to anyone else.

[ColemanMaskell]

14. Administrative leave WITH pay during investigation is the right course

Agree with the statement that police accused of a crime deserve the same consideration, presumption of innocence, and humane treatment as anyone else accused of a crime deserves.
The video evidence is just that, evidence, to be used in a trial. It doesn't matter how obvious it looks to you viewing it; Our system is that the accused has a right to trial, in which ALL evidence can be presented, and the video is just one part of a composite collection of all available information.

"Let us not become the evil we deplore."

[ColemanMaskell]

13. Police Unions blocking reform

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/09/19/why-are-police-unions-blocking-reform

WHY ARE POLICE UNIONS BLOCKING REFORM?

Their defense of officers’ working conditions is a barrier to investigating misconduct claims and getting rid of those who break the rules.

By James Surowiecki

. . . Recently, even as the use of excessive force against minorities has caused outcry and urgent calls for reform, police unions have resisted attempts to change the status quo, attacking their critics as enablers of crime.

Police unions emerged later than many other public-service unions, but they’ve made up for lost time. Thanks to the bargains they’ve struck on wages and benefits, police officers are among the best-paid civil servants. More important, they’ve been extraordinarily effective in establishing control over working conditions. All unions seek to insure that their members have due-process rights and aren’t subject to arbitrary discipline, but police unions have defined working conditions in the broadest possible terms. This position has made it hard to investigate misconduct claims, and to get rid of officers who break the rules. A study of collective bargaining by big-city police unions, published this summer by the reform group Campaign Zero, found that agreements routinely guarantee that officers aren’t interrogated immediately after use-of-force incidents and often insure that disciplinary records are purged after three to five years.

Furthermore, thanks to union contracts, even officers who are fired can frequently get their jobs back. Perhaps the most egregious example was Hector Jimenez, an Oakland police officer who was dismissed in 2009, after killing two unarmed men, but who then successfully appealed and, two years later, was reinstated, with full back pay. The protection that unions have secured has helped create what Samuel Walker, an emeritus professor of criminal justice at the University of Nebraska at Omaha, and an expert on police accountability, calls a “culture of impunity.” Citing a recent Justice Department investigation of Baltimore’s police department, which found a systemic pattern of “serious violations of the U.S. Constitution and federal law,” he told me, “Knowing that it’s hard to be punished for misconduct fosters an attitude where you think you don’t have to answer for your behavior.”

[Odin2005]

15. BULLSHIT! The police are out of control!

[Dawson Leery]

16. The FOP likely told the deputy to use that vile defense.